Unlike religious holidays, it is universally celebrated and universally enjoyed.

New Year’s Day requires no special decorations (confetti is nice, but not necessary); has no special set of colors (unlike the red and green of Christmas), is non-denominational and completely international. It wraps the globe like a warm wave of positive energy, moving from culture to culture as the grey line of propagation makes its daily revolution around the planet.

For Americans, the New Year—in this case 2019– starts on one side of the world and in a vastly different time zone (Asia), and then works its’ way around to us, arriving—conveniently for network television—at prime time in America.

Midnight is the demarcation line and seldom has midnight had more importance. Within the space of one minute, one year will go and another one will arrive. One door shuts and another one opens; it’s concrete and finite and everyone on earth knows it.

Unlike much in modern life, it is unequivocal; there is no room for debate or no grey area: 2018, Out. 2019, In. Carry on.

The New Year comes in; the old one goes out and you get a re-set.

Whether or not you are the type that likes to stay up until midnight partying and socializing or prefer to bring in the New Year more privately, the time-space effect is going to be the same: you will say goodbye to 2018 and hello to 2019 in just a matter of hours and you will join billions on the planet in doing so.

The New Year’s celebration (New Year’s Eve/New Year’s Day)is best understood as a two day event, not a single day one, although a bit of partying can easily make them run together and seem like one never-ending holiday. I’ve had those moments myself, although not as much lately as in the past.

New Year’s Eve is the big celebratory party day, starting, depending upon your schedule, at about 4PM and continuing past (or well past) midnight. It is time for partying, eating, dancing, loud music, and new found enthusiasm for kissing people you do not know particularly well. New Year’s Eve is the last day of the old year. Congratulations: You made it. You have the right to get silly and celebrate. (Safety note: just don’t drive if you drink; crash in place and tell everyone you didn’t want to miss anything when you wake up the next day).

New Year’s Day itself –the daylight portion—is of course, the first day of the New Year and is for recovery, family, football and begging for forgiveness if your enthusiasm for kissing people you do not know particularly well got out of hand, as it often does on such a night. If that turns out to be the case—well, best of luck to you. You may find out the hard way that the old saying that it’s “better to ask for forgiveness than to seek permission” does not apply to random groping and hot twerking in a tuxedo. Just hope that no one from the press or a particularly well-circulated internet site was snapping photos in hopes of making one reputation (theirs) while crushing another one (yours).

In addition to post-celebration recovery and football, and a full day of grazing at the New Year’s Day buffet table, New Year’s Day is also famous for New Year’s Resolutions. As a matter of fact, that (and begging for forgiveness) might be the very best option for New Year’s Day.

Although one can make a resolution at any time of the year, New Year’s Day is always the very best time to do so. Making them in June or July seems a bit pointless and lonesome.

You’re expected to re-start and re-set on New Year’s Day. This is the day of forgiveness for habits past(see above). Have at it. You’ll be in good company. Literally millions of resolutions will be made by sundown of New Year’s Day (and no doubt another million broken by dawn of the next day) but it’s a tradition and a form of personal positivism that should be encouraged. New Year’s resolutions speak to your best intentions, so indulge and encourage yourself. If you want to re-set some part of your life, career, health program, or diet, New Year’s is the very best day to do it. The timing is in your favor.

Take society up on the open book for reconciliation and change it’s given you and understand the dynamics.

New Year’s Eve is the end; New Year’s Day is the beginning.

So do with yourself what you so often have done to your computer. Hit the re-set button. Enjoy shutting down the old days, the old ways, the memories past (both good and bad), flash your personal RAM and relish the re-start, the new energy, the revised perspective, the bigger dreams. Simultaneously enjoy the freedom of letting go and the exhilaration of unbounded possibilities. Dream a little.

One day is for reflection; the other for projection. One set of stories and days and events are now complete; another set of adventures and trials and days and nights are to come.

More than any other holiday, New Year’s celebrates the possible, the unknown, the future, the passage of time and the new journey.

Once a year, mankind is all on the same page. And while the moment of synchronicity will disappear in just hours, we are all united by the hope (and promise) of a new year, a new start, a new beginning. New Year’s Day 2019 remains what all New Year’s Days have been through time: one more chance to really, really get it right.

It’s the New Year. Celebrate tonight. Recalibrate tomorrow.

Re-Set.

This post was originally published on New Year’s, 2014 and has been re-published every year since then. It has been modified to reflect re-posting for 2019.

Well, here it is, the end of the year and after the Crush of Christmas, we now flow into the end-of-the-year lists that provide, in shorthand, an overview of what happened during the year, as in “Year’s 10 Best Movies” or “2018’s 5 Best New Salad Dressings.” Always compelling new stuff and to save you from the PITA that comes from looking up all these lists on your own, the Perception Engineering and Media Bunker staff have done the hard clicking for you. Please find below, the year 2018, as defined by lists; above, of course, leading off this post, is the Associated Press review of their biggest stories of the year. New lists will be added on a regular basis. Read our lists and be the most informed person in the room on what actually happened in a tumultuous, wild, unpredictable, incredible, outrageous, ground-breaking year.

The Fine Print: The Year in List is compilation of hyperlinks to stories, lists, and data that define the year, assembled by Perception Engineering and the Media Bunker; title and editorial component design copyright (c)2018, donald pierce, all rights reserved. If you want to link to this list–that’s fine. Just, please, give us credit (as we do for all the sources we link to). We thank each of the publishing sources above for the work involved in producing each list; someone did a lot of research and we are delighted to be able to share this information, data, and viewpoints with you. Have a great 2019. See you next year.

The Nightshift publishes direct links to the world’s greatest English language newspapers to facilitate research and encourage understanding of the world’s events of the day as well as provide resources to follow certain segments of sports, business, society, art, and weather.

We have added the New York Times Morning Briefing to give you a brief overview of the news and Golf WRX, a specialized news/reviews/information site that covers golf, professional golf, and golf equipment.

The Fine Print. Images courtesy of GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. All rights belong to them or their designate. This image has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. This post is number 2126 for this site (we stay busy overnight). The Nightshift is a continually evolving experiment in news communications and is a production of Perception Engineering and The Media Bunker. Currently, The Nightshift staff is developing a very streamlined graphic/display approach to news distribution and it will appear from time to time. That doesn’t mean we won’t publish in the People, Places, and Events for Today format that we have used for the last year (and are using today) but it does mean that constant development of the site is one of the reasons we produce it. We also re-freshed links to the top five, which had been de-activated (for some odd reason). The Nightshift is rapid iteration within a surprisingly wide bandwidth. Thanks for reading. Now–catch up on the world .

The Nightshift publishes direct links to the world’s greatest English language newspapers to facilitate research and encourage understanding of the world’s events of the day as well as provide resources to follow certain segments of sports, business, society, art, and weather.

We have added the New York Times Morning Briefing to give you a brief overview of the news and Golf WRX, a specialized news/reviews/information site that covers golf, professional golf, and golf equipment.

Today is Tick Tock Day. The day designed to remind you that there only a few days left to finish off 2018’s left over to-do list.

The Fine Print. Images courtesy of GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. All rights belong to them or their designate. This image has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. This post is number 2122 for this site (we stay busy overnight). The Nightshift is a continually evolving experiment in news communications and is a production of Perception Engineering and The Media Bunker. Currently, The Nightshift staff is developing a very streamlined graphic/display approach to news distribution and it will appear from time to time. That doesn’t mean we won’t publish in the People, Places, and Events for Today format that we have used for the last year (and are using today) but it does mean that constant development of the site is one of the reasons we produce it. We also re-freshed links to the top five, which had been de-activated (for some odd reason). The Nightshift is rapid iteration within a surprisingly wide bandwidth. Thanks for reading. Now–catch up on the world .

The Nightshift publishes direct links to the world’s greatest English language newspapers to facilitate research and encourage understanding of the world’s events of the day as well as provide resources to follow certain segments of sports, business, society, art, and weather.

We have added the New York Times Morning Briefing to give you a brief overview of the news and Golf WRX, a specialized news/reviews/information site that covers golf, professional golf, and golf equipment.

Today is Pledge of Allegiance Day….a good day to think about your relationship with your country.

The Fine Print. Images courtesy of GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. All rights belong to them or their designate. This image has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. This post is number 2122 for this site (we stay busy overnight). The Nightshift is a continually evolving experiment in news communications and is a production of Perception Engineering and The Media Bunker. Currently, The Nightshift staff is developing a very streamlined graphic/display approach to news distribution and it will appear from time to time. That doesn’t mean we won’t publish in the People, Places, and Events for Today format that we have used for the last year (and are using today) but it does mean that constant development of the site is one of the reasons we produce it. We also re-freshed links to the top five, which had been de-activated (for some odd reason). The Nightshift is rapid iteration within a surprisingly wide bandwidth. Thanks for reading. Now–catch up on the world .

The Nightshift publishes direct links to the world’s greatest English language newspapers to facilitate research and encourage understanding of the world’s events of the day as well as provide resources to follow certain segments of sports, business, society, art, and weather.

We have added the New York Times Morning Briefing to give you a brief overview of the news and Golf WRX, a specialized news/reviews/information site that covers golf, professional golf, and golf equipment.

Today is National Fruitcake Day. A little fruitcake, a cup of coffee…not a bad holiday snack.

The Fine Print. Images courtesy of GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. All rights belong to them or their designate. This image has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. This post is number 2122 for this site (we stay busy overnight). The Nightshift is a continually evolving experiment in news communications and is a production of Perception Engineering and The Media Bunker. Currently, The Nightshift staff is developing a very streamlined graphic/display approach to news distribution and it will appear from time to time. That doesn’t mean we won’t publish in the People, Places, and Events for Today format that we have used for the last year (and are using today) but it does mean that constant development of the site is one of the reasons we produce it. We also re-freshed links to the top five, which had been de-activated (for some odd reason). The Nightshift is rapid iteration within a surprisingly wide bandwidth. Thanks for reading. Now–catch up on the world .

If you want to get a real understanding of what goes on around the Christmas holiday, take a walk around your neighborhood.

Many of us do that, just to see the Christmas lights and how all the houses are decorated.

But, this year, take one more Christmas time walk around the neighborhood–and do it on December 26th, the day after Christmas.

And, this time, direct your attention to what’s left by the curb, not the home decorations.

We’re talking Christmas trash.

Maybe in your neighborhood, like in mine, the trash pickup arrives–ever so conveniently for this article–on Wednesday, the 26th, i.e. today.

So on this morning’s walkabout, I took a camera and noted what had been sent to the dump, with the idea in mind that it would provide some interesting insight into the Christmas-holiday-spending-and-giving-and-getting sociology of my own neighborhood.

It did. Here’s a brief overview of the sociology of Christmas Trash, as seen in one rather All-American Neighborhood.

You can very easily tell which families have kids and which do not. The houses with kids have lots of trash in front. Those houses that don’t have kids have much less trash and wrapping paper to be tossed. There is always the chance (high in many neighborhoods) that the homeowners went to visit their relatives/kids/family in another town or state and so no one was home this Christmas and the trash pile reflected that. On the other hand, there is also the very real chance that some of the houses with a small CTI (Christmas Trash Index) are inhabited by folks who don’t celebrate Christmas at all. Fair enough. But if you want a quick litmus test about who’s in and who’s out for Yuletide giving, check the the CTI at each of the houses.

Families with small children have a higher CTI than families with older kids. Smaller kids get more stuff, which means more boxes(small), more wrapping, etc. Older kids get clothes and money and stuff in bigger boxes and once in a while a new car, but you can generally match the Christmas trash to the family inside and–based on your knowledge of your neighbors, it’ll match up.

Today’s kids are totally spoiled. If you see a home with a six foot high pile of Christmas trash and gift boxes–80% of it for toys and kids’ stuff–you may assume that at least one or maybe all of the children in that family are totally spoiled. I noticed lots of very large trash piles at the homes where I knew there were (small) children.

Every home orders from Amazon. It was the exception, not the rule, to find a trash pile that did not have at least one Amazon box in it, and most had two or more. At some houses, almost all of the boxes were from Amazon, a very shorthand way to note that Amazon is huge in America and at no time is it bigger than Christmas.

Gifting Trends are readily on display. The boxes tell the story. For adults, the most gifted items were Instant Pots, large screen TV displays, small electronics like Alexa (from Amazon). For kids, the old stand byes–Legos, Bikes, Dolls and Doll Houses, basketball and soccer goals–remain very popular. Not so many of the powered skateboards this year–maybe those fires that kept erupting and burning houses down cooled the market’s fever for that previously too-hot Christmas gift.

Some families are way ahead of the curve in moving the Christmas boxes and wrapping out of the house. And some are not. Last night, late, some families had already moved the remains of Christmas past to the curb. There’s a certain efficiency in such a movement, and it happens a lot with large families, who have too much to look after to get tied up in nostalgia. Get the gift; open it; give appropriate thanks; send the boxes and wrappings out the door. Thank you, Next.

Christmas is very expensive. The sheer variety of gifts and the expense of some of those gifts (as signified by the packaging and fancy names on boxes) points to the the conclusion that Americans just spend a lot of money at Christmas. It takes time to shop, some gifts–especially electronics and jewelry and certain sports equipment–is very expensive. I did not see any sign of Dan Aykroyd’s legendary $1.99 “Bag o’Broken Glass” packaging from the classic SNL skit (with Candy Bergman). I did see lots of electrically powered mini-go-carts, sure to terrorize neighborhood drivers for months to come.

Gifts of Christmas Past are obvious by their absence. Not a lot of computer boxes and packaging in the Christmas piles that I saw today. No Apple boxes, nothing from HP or Dell or Microsoft. No cell phone boxes–assume that someone got a new cell phone for Christmas, but the boxes are so small, they could have been tucked away in larger boxes and not visible. Whether or not this information would be considered sufficiently vetted to bet your next stock market trade on it–well, wouldn’t do that. But, just as a walking observation, the absence of computer and cell phone packaging indicates that the gift givers went in a different direction this year. Perhaps not coincidently, so did the stock market.

If you haven’t taken a walk around your neighborhood yet today, you might want to grab a jacket (if it’s cool outside) and go for a stroll. And pay attention to what’s left by the curb.

A family culture is talking to you in every trash pile and you don’t have to be a sociologist to understand the meaning.

Hope that you had a Merry Christmas, and may your CTI be off the charts.

The Nightshift publishes direct links to the world’s greatest English language newspapers to facilitate research and encourage understanding of the world’s events of the day as well as provide resources to follow certain segments of sports, business, society, art, and weather.

We have added the New York Times Morning Briefing to give you a brief overview of the news and Golf WRX, a specialized news/reviews/information site that covers golf, professional golf, and golf equipment.

Today is Boxing Day (also the day to return stuff to that you got for Christmas but really, really, don’t like/need).

The Fine Print. Images courtesy of GettyImages.com, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. All rights belong to them or their designate. This image has not been altered in anyway. We thank them for sharing. This post is number 2121 for this site (we stay busy overnight). The Nightshift is a continually evolving experiment in news communications and is a production of Perception Engineering and The Media Bunker. Currently, The Nightshift staff is developing a very streamlined graphic/display approach to news distribution and it will appear from time to time. That doesn’t mean we won’t publish in the People, Places, and Events for Today format that we have used for the last year (and are using today) but it does mean that constant development of the site is one of the reasons we produce it. We also re-freshed links to the top five, which had been de-activated (for some odd reason). The Nightshift is rapid iteration within a surprisingly wide bandwidth. Thanks for reading. Now–catch up on the world .

There are lots of ways to remember and celebrate the holidays, but perhaps one of the most powerful–and poignant–is to go back and take a look at the Christmas/Holiday shows that legendary entertainer Bob Hope put on for U.S. Troops stationed abroad in war zones. Hope was famous for these shows and performed for the troops from World War II to the Persian Gulf War, a period of over 50 years. Here is one Hope’s shows–his Bob Hope Christmas Special from 1967–fresh out of the vault. A very good way to spend some time on Christmas Day.

The Fine Print: Embed made possible via YouTube and Nuclear Vault, originally published on YouTube in 2011. All rights belong to respective rights holders. This video has not been altered in any way. Merry Christmas.

“We need an island Christmas this yearLet’s have an island Christmas this year….…No snow to shovel on Christmas DayWe’ll snorkel through a turquoise bay……”